Press Release
off-market/off to market…
An exhibition by the Photo Incubator: Edition Four participants
Opening
Saturday 30 March 2019
11h30
Gallery 1989
Market Photo Workshop
Exhibition showcase and Public programme
Saturday 30 March 2019
14h00
00651 Tshabalala St, Mofolo Central, Soweto, 1801
Eyethu Lifestyle Centre
The notion of trading ‘off-market’ is allusive to activity performed outside of the formal market place, whilst ‘off to market’ states an intention to attend to trade in its recognized space. The choice in title for this showcase references the many so-called ‘alternative’ markets which allow for legible and agile photography to perform itself to informed and ready audiences. The projects produced in the fourth Photography Incubator Programme probe and explore these little attended ‘markets’, spaces where ideas within and on photography may be shared or traded. The incubates have used this opportunity to question the proliferation of the image in our contemporary setting whilst also investigating the poor reflexes evident in archiving and historicizing images created for personal use and expression. In this showcase Lebogang Tlhako imagines the tote as a mobile exhibition space for earrings she trades on-line whilst Nocebo Bucibo adopts text as an alternative F-stop, the BLD Collective excavates family memories and notions of self-value by revisiting the family album and Tsepo Gumbi creates an on-line home for photographers seeking clients, workshops and scholarship. These 5 photographers have each re-enforced the need to engage with markets outside of the traditional, they have found their niche audiences and seek to cater their bespoke products, the tactile and intangible. They have all gone successfully ‘off-market’ and to market.
About the Photo Incubator: Edition Four
The Market Photo Workshop, with support from the Department of Arts and Culture, conducted the 2018 Photography Incubator Programme. The photography enterprises and
entrepreneurship Programme uses hands-on job experience, combined with technical and theoretical support and incubation, with the aim of enhancing and elevating photographers’ business ventures and artistic practice. The 7-month long programme provided participants with the practical experience and exposure to fully understand major aspects of the enterprise of photography. This includes photography entrepreneurship and business management, gallery practice, photography archives and collections, curatorial practice, editing, training and participatory projects and explored photography through artistic, commercial, and media practice.
The rationale behind the programme is to benefit emerging photographers – to better their lives, especially those living in marginalised areas such as informal settlements and
townships. The main objectives are to develop local content and economies in townships by giving emerging photographers access to resources and business opportunities.
Participants:
BLD Collective represented by Nathi Khumalo and Sanele Moya
Nocebo Bucibo
Lebogang Tlhako
Tsepo Gumbi
About the Market Photo Workshop
For 30 years, the Market Photo Workshop has played a pivotal role in the training of South Africa’s photographers, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalized parts of our society. World-renowned photographer David Goldblatt contributed vastly to the establishment of Market Photo Workshop in 1988 – 1999. Since then, the Photo Workshop has been an agent of change and representation, informing photographers, visual artists, educators, students and broader communities of trends, issues, and debates in photography and visual culture.
The Market Photo Workshop also runs a number of Public Programmes, which are a series of events involving and directed at professional photographers, visual artists, educators, students as well as the broader public. These Public Programmes seek to inform the trends, practices, methods, and contemporary ways of working and thinking in South African photography practice through exposure to a broad understanding of visual culture as well as a networking platform that encourages critical thinking and engagements. Showcasing a number of high profile local and international photographers, as well as student and alumni photography work, the Market Photo Workshop has been able to build a strong and consistent audience base around our gallery, ‘The Photo Workshop Gallery’ in Newtown, which is on the same premises as the school. Since 2005, when the gallery was initially launched, the kind of platform it has engendered encourages not only emerging students to experience and enter into professional practice, but has distilled a new type of photographic practice amongst the greater artistic community. Various critical discourses, especially around the role documentary photography, have been stimulated by the multitude of exhibitions that have shown at The Photo Workshop Gallery creating dynamic interactions between students and the greater photography community. In 2017, Market Photo Workshop relocated to its new state of art photography facility at Market Square premises by the Mary Fitzgerald Square.
Market Photo Workshop is the recipient of The Principal Prince Claus Award 2018.
For more information, please contact:
Bekie Ntini
Coordinator: Mentorships and Training
T +27 (0) 11 834 1444
E-mail: bekien@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Market Photo Workshop
c/o Market Square
138 Lilian Ngoyi St
Entrance at Margaret Macingana Street
Newtown
Johannesburg
info@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za
The Market Photo Workshop is a division of The Market Theatre Foundation.
